Socialism is as American as Apple pie. The pilgrims tried it for years and they ended up starving. Socialism has always been with the left in this country but it’s a different strain than the one that infected and murdered so many in Russia and China. The origin of America Socialism goes back to the Anglo/Puritans and protestant Christianity and eastern Socialism is from Marx and Judaism. Both strains will destroy a nation but the Anglo/Puritan version is much slower moving or incremental in nature.
When we finally consigned Marx to the ash heap of history we stopped fighting our own home grown version of it. Big mistake. Anglo/Purtin Socialism has mutated into a system that seeks the genocide and replacement of the people who practice it, sort of a modern day shakers movement on a huge scale.
Socialism was imposed on the Pilgrims by their investors. Socialism was never doctrinally part of mainstream Puritanism or Protestantism.
Good analogy, the USSR failed because central planning failed, not because everyone suddenly woke up one day and decided they didn’t like Marxism. The philosophy was hidden by the the overlay of the bureaucracy that people had to put up with on a daily basis, and they finally couldn’t take any more. Same thing in China, where the experiments in capitalism (e.g. Hong Kong and later, Shenzen, et al) provided the means to make productive use of millions of rural Chinese that communism never could. Of course the more centralized and socialistic a government is, the easier it is corrupted.
The American form of Socialism was amplified by Progressivism and the notion that government was the solution to all problems, which put us on the slippery slope that we now must try to climb back up. Had we turned instead to the American values and free market capitalims we would never have ended up where we’re at today.